News tagged with hookah

(HealthDay)—Some people believe smoking from a hookah is safe because smoke passes through water before being inhaled. But, a new study found that hookah smoking may actually be more dangerous than cigarettes.

Workers at New York City hookah bars are inhaling hazardous levels of carbon monoxide and nicotine while at work, signaling yet another breach by their employers of New York City's anti-smoking bylaws.

As cigarette smoking rates fall, more people are smoking tobacco from hookahs—communal pipes that enable users to draw tobacco smoke through water. A new meta-analysis led by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine ...

Nearly 1 in 5 recently surveyed high school seniors report having smoked tobacco from a hookah in the past year, and more than a third of them reported smoking hookahs often enough to be considered regular users, an analysis ...

Larger and private colleges and universities seem to attract hookah cafes and lounges, but smoke-free policies decrease these odds, according to findings published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine this month.

Many college students are making their way back to campus this month, and back to the habits - good or bad - that dorm-life promotes. A new study finds that young adults under 25, including high school grads and college students, ...

Contrary to popular belief, only a minimal amount of heavy metals are removed in the 'filtration' process when smoking shisha, also known as hookah, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Public Health. ...

Despite emerging evidence otherwise, many college students consider hookah smoking safer than smoking cigarettes, reports a University of South Florida (USF) College of Public Health study published this month by the Centers ...

Hookah

A hookah(Gujarati હૂકાહ) (Hindustani: हुक़्क़ा (Devanagari, حقّہ (Nastaleeq) huqqah) also known as a waterpipe or narghile, is a single or multi-stemmed (often glass-based) instrument for smoking in which the smoke is cooled by water. The tobacco smoked is referred to as shisha (sheesha) in the United Kingdom, United States, Mexico and Canada. Multiple references have traced the origin of the hookah to India. According to Cyril Elgood (pp. 41, 110), who does not mention his source, it was Abu’l-Fatḥ Gīlānī (d. 1588), a Persian physician at the Indian court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, who “first passed the smoke of tobacco through a small bowl of water to purify and cool the smoke and thus invented the hubble-bubble or hookah.” Nevertheless, a quatrain of Ahlī Šīrāzī (d. 1535) refers to the use of the ḡalyān (Falsafī, II, p. 277; Semsār, 1963, p. 15). Smoking the hookah has gained popularity outside of its native region, especially in the Middle East, and is gaining popularity in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

"One report in 1566 described the use of the narghile (coconut) in Indore. Narghiles were coconuts that were mounted on silver or other metals (Pritchett 1890). This was probably used for cannabis products. The hubble-bubble or hookah was a Middle eastern invention and the chilam appears to have been taken from the top of the water pipe and used independently. One variation was the panchachilam (five pipe) in which five bowls, each containing a different substance (including several types of opium, Cannabis, tobacco, and probably datura), were smoked together. One occasionally hears of this use today. Mushiran (1961:298) also mentioned that the smoking of tobacco, the substance now combined with ganja (Cannabis), was introduced by the Portuguese." (pp. 142-143 of the book Orgies of the Hemp Eaters, Autonomedia, 2004)